Large Economy Size

ISLAND IN THE SUN (538 pp.)--Alec Waugh-- Farrar, Strous & Cudahy ($3.95).

"I want a tube of toothpaste."

"Certainly. What kind?"

"Do you have Eucryl?"

"The large size or the small?"

"What is the difference in price?"

"The large size is thirty-six cents, the small size twenty-four."

"Then the large size is the better bargain."

"Yes, it's the better bargain."

"I'll have the large size."

Novelist Alec Waugh, Evelyn's elder brother, can squeeze out this sort of dialogue as fluently as any large-sized tube. To his gift of the gab, Alec adds a bird's-eye view of life: his new novel is fairly crammed to the horizons with ever-speaking likenesses. The book is a Literary Guild selection for January, has been condensed, serialized, and bought for the movies.

The setting is a British-governed island in the West Indies, and the problems involved are as numerous and various as the characters. Sugar Planter Maxwell Fleury suspects that he has Negro blood. His mother is reluctant to assure him that he has not, because it would mean admitting that Maxwell's real father was a 100% white with whom she committed adultery. Maxwell also suspects his wife Sylvia of an affair with a retired colonel, so he throttles the officer and is soon suspected of murder by the chief of police. Meanwhile, Carl Bradshaw, middle-aging reporter for the Baltimore Evening Star, suspects his editor of wanting to fire him, and hurries around the island digging up bucketfuls of newsworthy dirt. This upsets the governor, who suspects that he is not popular in Whitehall but does not suspect that his handsome aide-de-camp is going to bed with the colored ex-mistress of the island's leading subversive.

In the course of bringing all these suspicions to a head, doughty Author Waugh comes at least partly to grips with just about every personal, social and political problem that modern life can present. He even tackles that old favorite of the girls: Should I be a Good-Time-with-the-Boys or a Darling-I'm-So-Glad-I-Waited lassie? Waugh's implication (that men are much too dumb to know if a girl has waited or not) is the only trace of cynicism in a book that is filled to overflowing with a sense of boneless wonder.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.